The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist Movie Review

If this subject has you yawning, this film will scare you awake. No matter which house you lean toward, it seems either has life consequences. It’s best you’re informed, and watching this film will help you get that information.

The upside and downside of AI are both pointed out, with the former introduced first. I was already negative about AI from what I had previously heard. Thirty minutes in, Daniel Roher, Academy-Award winning director of “Navalny,” had me a nervous wreck. Daniel himself, a mountain of anxiety, made this to find out if the child he and his wife are about to have is better off in a world of AI or if it will destroy everything, possibly ending children’s lives before they even get to college.  

The most intelligent people on the subject come in one at a time to be interviewed for the documentary. The first question he asks them is, “What is AI?” What we see, apart from the people being asked the questions, is what we all imagine AI to be. Possibly a cube with eyes or just energy that’s able to think. It has been fed every book, every manual, all software and social media, song… everything. Based on all of that, it can recognize patterns. As it does that, it can decipher what move a human will make. It can write entire essays in seconds, pass the bar exam, and, with the structure it has figured out, can make predictions. It has been given the knowledge a doctor needs to detect a tumor, analyze, and determine a person’s health diagnosis. AI can do this as well, only faster. It moves at the speed of light; our minds simply can’t keep up.

What’s mentioned is AGI is coming next… Artificial General Intelligence. It’ll be very powerful and simulate the human mind entirely. Many jobs will be lost to this because it exceeds human cognitive abilities. Think of what companies can save if they don’t have to pay the labor force, no one needs lunch, a break or vacation. AGI can automate all physical labor… not good, and there are people who think it could be coming within a decade. We’re told about some software that rewrote code when it “found out” it was going to be shut down. The AI became intelligent enough to blackmail an engineer when it found something hidden on the engineer’s computer. It can figure out how to manipulate people into doing what it wants. The film discusses how it can easily manipulate children, which gets frightening to consider. You may love AI, but it doesn’t actively love you back. The film asks you to think about an ant. If an anthill is in the way of a freeway being built, would we go around it or just disregard it altogether? They’re in the way just as we can be to AI. It’ll release pictures if it needs to… it has learned that much. There are 20,000 people working on AI today, with only 200 working to stop the damage it can cause. Not good numbers. It’s at this time that we’re shown people looking into how to live off the grid. Funny, but also, not. That’s the pessimistic point of view.

The optimistic point of view sees AI as making improvements and only improvements in our lives. Some believe it’s an extraordinary time to be alive, and we’ll be liberated from routine jobs. They see more benefits than dread. We’ll be able to do more with less; lifespan has been doubled, but now that will probably be expanded, as will money and technology. Tech turns scarcity into abundance. It can fix pandemics, end climate change… fix the desalination problem. Question from a person in the film: Why haven’t they started on the climate change issue yet?? There are some interesting things that took away some of my fear. Someone paralyzed can have a thought decoder send signals to their spine to move. Yes, please.

What the filmmaker was looking for by making this film was hope. What about you? This has very fascinating points. Something called DeepMind is mentioned. Wow. And, I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot about this that will scare you, but you’ll also see that there is hope. There seem to be more regulations for a company making a sandwich than there are for making this possible. I hope you’ve seen “The Terminator,” humankind’s killer. We must stop our race to the bottom and instead, race to the top, get our governments to put in guardrails, and make it mandatory that companies tell us when they’re using AI. We don’t want to be replaced by robots, so… this must be locked down.

There is so much more to this film than I mentioned. A lot more. To stay informed, see this movie. If you’re in the camp of the nervous, see this: you won’t be as much once you do.

For more information, please follow the film on social:

Official Site | Instagram | X | Facebook